Re: one file per frame -- customization possible?

[Stefan Monnier]

>> One way is to set the value of special-display-regexps to a regexp
>> that matches any buffer name.

> Unfortunately, this just pertains to buffers that are normally opened in an
> emacs window, but not the ones that are simply shown in the current frame.
> Buffers with standard files are absolutely not affected by
> special-display-regexps; that's what the manual says and that's what I found
> out when I tried it!

It's not even that simple.  It depends on the command you use to get to
that buffer.  Basically, most Emacs commands don't just mean "show me this
file/buffer", but they mean something more specific like "show me this
file/buffer in the current window".  So the best thing to do is to get used
to using C-x 5 f instead of C-x C-f, C-x 5 b instead of C-x b, etc...

As mentioned, you'll want to set special-display-regexps to a very liberal
regexp (something like "\\`\\*.*\\*\\'" or even just ".*").  Also you'll
want to set pop-up-windows and pop-up-frames and most importantly,
you'll need to be ready to report bugs, because a fair bit of code
breaks (it's improved since Emacs-20.1, among other things because I use
such a setup and have reported/fixed a number of bugs).

I've added recently (I think it's only in Emacs-CVS) code so you can put
(same-frame . t) in the special-display-regexps and
special-display-buffer-names parameters so as to override the default
for those few buffers that you want to keep in split windows.

After you tried the above, feel free to ask questions about specific
problems and circumstances.  I've switched to such a setup (together with
a separate minibuffer-only frame) a long time ago and can't remember which
part(s) of my .emacs is relevant so I might have missed some parts.


        Stefan